My unbiased experience with JLCPCB

I needed to fabricate some PCBs. I’ve seen some youtubers to advertise and recommend this service so I decided to give it a try. My order was done without using any affiliation link or discount code so there was no way for them to know who I am. I needed to create a microSD breakout board and luckily I found a similar OSHw project and only made some modifications: https://github.com/danielkucera/MicroSD_Sniffer . I prepared my board in Eagle and generated gerber files.

After uploading a zip with gerber files to JLCPCB I’ve got offered 10 PCBs together for $2 PLUS! $5.3 for the cheapest shipping so $0.73 per one. This didn’t make sense to me so I increased the quantity to 50 what gave me a total price of $14.60 => $0.29 per one. If I compare it to a local service (www.plosnaky.cz), they offered a price 170Kc/10pcs = $7.5 which was roughly the same but 709Kc/50pcs = $31.3. On the other hand, last time I used plosnaky.cz, the board was in my mailbox within a week but since the JLCPCB shipping cost was so high, I though it might come from China in two weeks too (I’ve seen such delivery times for some of my other orders from China in the past).

The order went well and I could watch my order in their portal:

So I was waiting and watching production process:

When it finally arrived, I was a little bit disappointed by the shipping time of about 1 month:

But the packaging was very nice:

And the final product:

They’ve added some strange code into the top silkscreen but it doesn’t matter much to me. Overall, I’m really satisfied with the result, the only small issue is a unevenly applied solder mask but it has no effect on it’s function.

So for me it was a good deal and I recommend you to use their services. If you want one of these boards (as I have plenty of them 🙂 ) drop me a line.